ABSTRACT
Explanation and prediction of compacted soils fall under unsaturated soil mechanics, which has become a frontier in soil mechanics over the last several decades. Two main approaches have been proposed, namely the use of net stress and suction as independent variables (e.g., Fredlund and Rahardjo, 1993; Sheng et al., 2008) and effective stress approach (see Loret and Khalili, 2002), where suction is combined with net stress to represent the stress state. A major difficulty of using these approaches is that suction is hard to measure especially in the field, and the testing associated with suction can be very complex and time consuming. Recently, Kodikara (2012) put forward a framework dubbed MPK that does not require suction to be known for predicting the volumetric behavior of compacted soils. Instead it utilized family of compaction curves as its central building block, where net stress, void ratio (or dry density) and moisture ratio (e wG Vw s w s/ ,V where w is gravimetric moisture content,Gs is the specific gravity) are used as key state variables. In the present paper, this framework is used to examine the long term stability of compacted soils under operating external and environmental loadings.
